Month: May 2019

  • ,

    The best coffee in the world: Black Eye Coffee, Ubud

    The top spot on my Search For The Best Cup of Coffee list has, for quite a long time, been held by Burgundy & Black in Dorking. It is not for lack of searching, they just make a really good cup of coffee. But their crown has finally been taken – and I had to…

  • Introducing The Rake Values

    Fashion is expensive. It is a well-known, thought little-discussed truth of the stylish classes that looking good, on the whole, takes money. There are stories of those who have pulled off a brilliant find hand have managed to come out looking like they have just rolled out of the front row at LFWM for the…

  • Game Of Thrones: The person who should sit on the Iron Throne

    “When you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die.” Cersei Lannister’s words to Ned Stark are a pretty much perfect summary of the whole series. For almost a decade we have been watching the Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens and others battle to sit on the Iron Throne. Oh, before we go on…spoilers. Obviously.…

  • Vans x Harry Potter are the shoes you need this summer

    Accio trainers! I’m not going to deny, or apologise for, being a Harry Potter fan. The boy wizard, his friends and their adventures were the seminal fiction of my youth. I loved the books, I enjoyed the films and I do spend a fair amount of time trawling EMP’s Harry Potter collection. If you haven’t…

  • Game of Thrones fans, we need to talk about Daenerys

    Game of Thrones was on last night. It was the penultimate episode ever. Before I go on, obviously, spoilers. Don’t come at me for writing about something which happened on TV last night, you’ve been warned and I’ve made my thoughts on spoilers very clear already. So, this morning I woke up having not seen…

  • Around the world in 80 cocktails with Mr Fogg’s

    Immersive bar experiences are everywhere in London today. It is almost impossible to scroll through Facebook or Instagram without seeing a photo of cocktails in an outlandish vessel or staff dressed to the nines as anything from 1920’s high society to Game of Thrones-esque lords and ladies. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good…

  • Dressing Camp: Met Gala 2019

    The Met Gala 2019 took place last night. The “Oscars of the fashion industry” took its theme from the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion. Historically, the theme for the evening has caused problems for guests – in 2014, event chair and Vogue editor Anna Wintour declared Benedict Cumberbatch as the…

  • If cannabis is the answer, what is the question?

    This column originally appeared in DFNI* Late last year, United States Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the production of industrial hemp as a “bright spot” for America’s embattled tobacco farmers. It was a marked shift for the man who, in 2014, told a radio station that legalising marijuana would be “giving up”. But the…